Representing control systems in a semantic database management system within a functional programming environment

A dynamical control system is typically hierarchical, in that it consists of sub-blocks which are themselves dynamical systems. In this paper the authors shall be concentrating on structures with just this kind of arbitrary, nested complexity, which the authors call `deeply structured´, to distinguish them from the `simple structures´ like integers and strings which commonly form the set of allowable database entries. The authors have tried to use deeply structured data as the basic currency of database transactions whilst building data models for dynamical control systems. The overall plan of the paper is to introduce and distinguish between several different sorts of data-format and constraint mechanism which the authors have investigated, concentrating on abstract data-typing and type-control in particular